A design approach to the multi-objective facility layout problem

A new multi-objective heuristic algorithm for resolving the facility layout problem is presented in this paper. It incorporates qualitative and quantitative objectives and resolves the problem of inconsistent scales and different measurement units. We consider suboptimal solutions since optimal methods are computationally unfeasible to large layout problems. In this paper, we develop the dominant index and incorporate it in our heuristic algorithm to guarantee the quality of proposed solutions. Moreover, a new measure of solution quality, dominant probability, is offered to determine the probability that one layout is better than the others. Computational results show that our proposed heuristic algorithm is an efficient method for obtaining good-quality solutions.